Here are some excerpts attributed to managers of the South Florida Water Management District, with an interpretation of, “Questions and answers about the drought”.
“… the regional population has swelled about 25 percent between 1995 and 2005.”
''As water managers, we absolutely cannot forecast the future…We have no control over Mother Nature.''
“State water managers stress that they have no authority to ban new development, and until recently, the maxed-out water supply didn't play a big role in growth management.”
“As for development, more condos and gated communities… might make the system more vulnerable, deepening and lengthening the effects of droughts when they do come.”
In other words: water managers have no authority to stop development, can’t forecast the impacts, and won't take any responsibilty for either. (Overdevelopment "might" impact the seriousness of the drought?)
At a time when the Florida legislature is obsessed with cutting and pasting taxes from one source to another like paragraphs in Microsoft Word, the mismanagement of Florida’s fresh water resources shifts billions of dollars of infrastructure expense to unwitting taxpayers.
Overdevelopment in South Florida has stripped the elasticity of suppy of fresh water, which is abundant, with demand. Period.
Countless water consumption permits issued by state officials at the request of local counties, dominated by land speculators and developers, have pressed the water system right to the edge. Hallandale, Lake Worth, and Boca Raton are showing salt water in drinking water wells.
The writer James Howard Kunstler writes, "we are a cruel and wicked people who deserve to be punished." In South Florida, that punishment would include biblical drought, global warming, and the continued domination of zoning and permitting by special interests.
Count on being told that these costs, immeasurable really, are the inevitable result of progress and inflation. Is it any wonder that Miami is having a difficult time retaining the middle class or attracting high skilled workers?
If you haven't already, read Jared Diamond's, Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed.
4 comments:
Engineers: Do they ever get it right?
It is a good point. In absence of any plan for growth informed by what citizens want, local legislatures defer to engineers and consultants who are hired to produce just about any result that special interests want. It is a story driven by money and by greed. There is no environmental resource problem that cannot be fixed, in this universe, by engineers. The problem is that undoing the damage of so much hubris is extraordinarily costly, if it can be undone at all. And so what the public perceives to be acceptable costs of growth shifts gradually to lower and lower standards and thresholds: people stuck in cars on the Palmetto vote for the same corruption time after time.
We are having a very tough time trying to keep up with our insatiable demand for more water.
Miami Residential Units Under Construction: 22,254
Miami Residential Units Recently Approved: 60,232
I heard that Miami-Dade County is even considering installing a very expensive desalination plant on Virginia Key.
The real dilemma is that our county and city continues to permit more building and the ever present pressure of expansion the Urban Development Boundary (UBD) into the Everglades, even though we have too little water and too much sewage.
How can our country expect to address the problems of Global Warming when our counties and cities are unwilling to face the immediate challenges of urban sprawl?
Harry Emilio Gottlieb
Coconut Grove
Your last question is dead-center of the massive denial at the heart of our political system (of course, a consequence of campaign finance rules) and the refusal of the mainstream media to address the implications head-on.
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